One argument I’ve heard, which seems valid enough, is that running a homelab setup without EEC memory is a good thing, because you then need to build stuff that

One argument I’ve heard, which seems valid enough, is that running a homelab setup without EEC memory is a good thing, because you then need to build stuff that can handle memory errors (or at least notice and learn from them) which you will occasionally see in your half a dozen or so homelab machines. Once your deploying production work systems “at scale” with hundreds (or thousands) of servers, you will be guaranteed to see occasional memory errors (probably even with ECC). One of my first real homelab setups, was 6 raspberry pi’s, laid out as two load balancer, two web app servers, and two database servers. The “unreliability” of pi’s running everything off SD cards was a _feature_ because it gave me lots of experience in how my (work) software stack running on our typical AWS design held up in face of failures.